Gamer

Tara Hunt '12 | May 6, 2015

Fifteen-year-old Sarah Brenzel lay awake on an operating room table as doctors slowly slid a catheter through an incision in her groin, up her femoral artery, through her aorta and, finally, up into the arteries in her brain. She started to shake. The doctor quickly reminded her that one wrong movement could puncture a vessel and cause a stroke or death. She lay still once more.

After hours of painstaking maneuvering they got to the spot: a large, oblong aneurysm in the middle cerebral artery.

For nearly three years, Brenzel ’12 had been shuttled back and forth from doctors’ offices and technicians’ labs. She was often absent from school. And she was living trapped in a chronic migraine.